In late December 1963, 17-year-old Randy Gardner and his friend Bruce McAllister decided to explore the effects of prolonged wakefulness. At first, they debated whether Bruce or Randy should stay awake. Bruce tried first but gave up after a day and a half, so Randy took over. He stayed awake for 11 days and 24 minutes (264.4 hours), breaking the previous record of 260 hours held by Tom Rounds.
Gardner’s record attempt was attended by Stanford sleep researcher Dr. William C. Dement, while his health was monitored by Lt. Cmdr. John J. Ross. A log was kept by two of Gardner’s classmates from Point Loma High School, Bruce McAllister and Joe Marciano Jr. Accounts of Gardner’s sleep deprivation experience and medical response became widely known among the sleep research community.
Speaking to NPR in 2017, Gardner said: “I was really nauseous. And this went on for just about the entire rest of the experiment. And it just kept going downhill. I mean, it was crazy where you couldn’t remember things. It was almost like an early Alzheimer’s thing brought on by lack of sleep.”
But Gardner stayed awake. The experiment gained the attention of local reporters, which, in Gardner’s opinion, was good for the experiment “because that kept me awake,” he said. “You know, you’re dealing with these people and their cameras and their questions.”
It has been claimed that Gardner’s experiment demonstrated that extreme sleep deprivation has little effect, other than the mood changes associated with tiredness, primarily due to a report by researcher William C. Dement, who stated that on the tenth day of the experiment, Gardner had been, among other things, able to beat Dement at pinball. However, contrary to this, Lieutenant Commander John J. Ross, who monitored his health, reported serious cognitive and behavioral changes. These included moodiness, problems with concentration and short-term memory, paranoia, and hallucinations. On the eleventh day, when he was asked to subtract seven repeatedly, starting with 100, he stopped at 65. When asked why he had stopped, he replied that he had forgotten what he was doing.
On his final day, Gardner presided over a press conference where he appeared to be in excellent health. “I wanted to prove that bad things didn’t happen if you went without sleep,” said Gardner. “I thought, ‘I can break that record and I don’t think it would be a negative experience.’”
Gardner’s sleep recovery was observed by sleep researchers who noted changes in sleep structure during post-deprivation recovery. After completing his record, Gardner slept for 14 hours and 46 minutes, awoke naturally around 8:40 p.m., and stayed awake until about 7:30 p.m. the next day, when he slept an additional ten and a half hours. Gardner appeared to have fully recovered from his loss of sleep, with follow-up sleep recordings taken one, six, and ten weeks after the fact, showing no significant differences.
However, in 2017, Gardner reported that he started experiencing serious insomnia around 2007, decades after his sleep experiment, and believed his participation in the 1960s sleep study was to blame.
According to news reports, Gardner’s record has been broken but his case still stands out, however, because it has been so extensively documented. It is difficult to determine the accuracy of a sleep deprivation period unless the participant is carefully observed to detect short microsleeps, which the participant might not even notice. Also, records for voluntary sleep deprivation are no longer kept by Guinness World Records for fear that participants will suffer ill effects.
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